He let the plodding horse measure a full half-mile before he turned and looked at her with anger and despair glooming in his eyes.

“Tell me one thing, Ardea, and maybe it will shut my mouth.  What is Vincent Parley to you—­anything more than Eva’s brother?”

Another young woman might have claimed her undoubted right to evade such a pointed question.  But Ardea saw safety only in instant frankness.

“He has asked me to be his wife, Tom.”

“And you have consented?”

“I wonder if I have,” she said half-musingly.

“Don’t you know?” he demanded.  And then, “Ardea, I’d rather see you dead and in your coffin!”

“Just why—­apart from your prejudice?”

“It’s Beauty and the Beast over again.  You don’t know Vint Farley.”

“Don’t I?  My opportunities have been very much better than yours,” she retorted.

“That may be, but I say you don’t know him.  He is a whited sepulcher.”

“But you can not particularize,” she insisted.  “And the evidence is all the other way.”

Tom was silent.  During the summer of strugglings he had gone pretty deeply into the history of Chiawassee Consolidated, and there was commercial sharp practice in plenty, with some nice balancings on the edge of criminality.  Once, indeed, the balance had been quite lost, but it was Dyckman who had been thrust into the breach, or who had been induced to enter it by falsifying his books.  Yet these were mere business matters, without standing in the present court.

“The evidence isn’t all one-sided,” he asserted.  “If you were a man, I could convince you in two minutes that both of the Farleys are rascals and hypocrites.”

“Yet they are your father’s business associates,” she reminded him.

He saw the hopelessness of any argument on that side, and was silent again, this time until they had passed the Deer Trace gates and he had cut the buggy before the great Greek-pillared portico of the manor-house.  When he had helped her out, she thanked him and gave him her hand quite in the old way; and he held it while he asked a single blunt question.

“Tell me one thing more, Ardea:  do you love Vincent Farley?”

Her swift blush answered him, and he did not wait for her word.

“That settles it; you needn’t say it in so many words.  Isn’t it a hell of a world, Ardea?  I love you—­love you as this man never will, never could.  And with half his chance, I could have made you love me.  I—­”

“Don’t, Tom! please don’t,” she begged, trying to free her hand.

“I must, for this once; then we’ll quit and go back to the former things.  You said a while ago that I was vindictive; I’ll show you that I am not.  When the time comes for me to put my foot on Vint Farley’s neck, I’m going to spare him for your sake.  Then you’ll know what it means to have a man’s love.  Good-by; I’m coming over for a few minutes this evening if you’ll let me.”